Really, really love Larkin Grimm, great songwriter and performer, and her first album for Young God Records, Parplar, is easily a standout of the year for me. To quote from my review:

Totaling 15 songs, Parplar, recorded with the assistance of [Young God boss Michael] Gira and a number of guest performers, is still straight-up Grimm, with the opening song’s beautifully performed first lyric, “Who told you you’re going to be all right?/They were wrong,” setting the unsettled tone. This isn’t winsome never-neverland, but a cascade of fractured emotions and wit.

From one billionaire sponsor of a proposition to another — but T. Boone Pickens works in different realms than Henry Nicholas III, thankfully.

On the face of it it’s almost like I’m getting past propositions reheated up at this point — alternative energy! transportation issues! bonds! So there’s something that feels a bit deadening right about now — maybe I’d feel differently approaching it if I had looked at it first of the twelve, I’m not sure.

A friend of mine put it to me this way, though:

i think that while undoubtedly SOME money will go into t. boone’s pocket, it could be a small price to pay for millions of dollars in research, subsidies for end-users, etc. right now i’m a “yes” voter, but i wish there was a “yes, but…” option.

I’m with that, but from a different angle, namely my current concern about bonds and budget and less the lining of T. Boone’s wallet. As it stands, I see nothing about his general approach that is somehow self-contradictory, as has been alleged — if someone who has grown rich off a resource is thinking, “Hmm, looks like it’s time to diversify for the long term,” then why be surprised if he tries to do so and seeks to swing public opinion his way? Whether or not you like that approach, of course, is another matter.

Ultimately, I’m deciding on this one the same way I’m deciding on 1 — while I’m not entirely thrilled with it all, I do think there is some sort of sense in investing for the future here, and this has more potential and interest to me. Further, there doesn’t seem to be the internecine environmental warfare going on here than with 7, at least on first blush.

As the election draws nearer and as I, frankly, feel a bit more tired, I admit I’m not as inclined to give these last few propositions as good a going over as they deserve. Which they do deserve, don’t get me wrong — but there’s almost a tendency to fully drift into autopilot at this point, and I can’t imagine I’m not alone. I think a lot of people aren’t so much waiting to get to Election Day but the day *after* Election Day.

So that said, this reflection on Prop 9, and the three remaining propositions to follow, will be somewhat swift — in this case, Prop 9 tackles one of those endless issues, crime and punishment. Having already suggested no votes for both 5 and 6, I’m pretty much inclined to go that route 9 as well.

Part of the reason why, I admit, is somewhat perverse — namely, the identity of the man who sponsored it (as well as 6, I now realize, which is even more hilarious in retrospect). Former Broadcom head Henry Nicholas III is, as they put it, a character — which is a kind way of noting that a guy who has been arrested for various drug, fraud and sex charges seems like an unlikely person to be sponsoring a victims’ rights law. But hey, that’s life for you.

That said, his reasons are deeply felt — his sister was murdered by an ex-boyfriend of hers back in the early eighties, and whatever else he’s done himself, anyone who couldn’t think that he has reasons to feel outraged still after all these years has a heart of stone. Yet I tend to agree more with the people arguing against 9 as this sounding like gilding the lily, and like 6 relying on emotion overriding more practical considerations. It’s a rhetorical difference, I admit, but in reviewing the arguments and rebuttals on the official site for the proposition, the fact that the no forces took a very cool, level headed line against the ALL CAPS APPROACH was appreciated.

But rhetoric isn’t enough, of course. In the end, this strikes me, especially in the wake of problematic laws like the Three Strikes effort, as overreaction, a focus that is so driven one way only that it introduces more problems than it solves. And, once again, it places demands on a state budget at just the wrong time in its fiscal history.

So the context for this photo, taken on Tuesday night — I heard from Brendan at Metal Edge that a small film company in the UK, Prism, was doing a DVD documentary on Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor and industrial music, having been commissioned by another firm to do so. I was intrigued and passed on my name, and soon Alec from Prism, who you can see there in shot, and I were talking online. After reading a positive review of Prism’s Iron Maiden/NWOBHM documentary by fellow ILX denizen/music writer Adrien Begrand I took that as a strong vote of confidence and our plans were set for Tuesday night filming.

Alec came down with his cameraman Pete (who took this photo — thanks again!) as part of the series of interviews they were doing throughout America, including Canada — turns out they’d barely had any proper food in a bit due to all the plane flights and running around so I directed them over to Taco Mesa first so we could have a good meal (and in their case, some actually good SoCal Mexican food for the first time).

Then it was back to the apartment for setting things up and filming — you can’t see the full setup in this shot but it was elaborate and quite imaginative given the circumstances. Since by default these kind of shoots mean working in a number of different environments, it’s no surprise that Alec and Pete had not only the equipment but the patience and time to work out best camera angles, lighting and so forth. Reminded me again how I really lack the patience for such work, I admit, so I was happy to let them do it!

Now, I’m under no illusions regarding all the filming we did — I’m one of many people, there’ll be a lot of editing, and if just a few comments pop up in the final product, that’ll be great. But it was good fun being asked to do something which I admit I love doing — going on about music a hell of a lot, in great detail — and since I’ve been a fan of NIN all these years, why not? I talked about concert stories, mass media contexts, the history of ‘industrial’ as a genre (I tried to emphasize a key point, namely that there is no way to describe said genre, and that it was in ways the success of NIN and Pretty Hate Machine in particular that fully codified a mainstream sense of what it was supposed to be, which Reznor’s essentially been kicking against ever since).

This went nearly up until midnight — I admit I was tired but Alec and Pete, jet-lagged to hell and back, were even more wiped — and they headed up north to carry on from there. Great folks! We idly talked over possibilities of future documentary appearances too at Alec’s suggestion — so we’ll see!